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Ep.20 – How to go SANE, Specifically


Carrie: Hello everyone! We are living the Smarter Science of Slim. This is Carrie Brown and Jonathan Bailor who is finding something incredibly amusing. I’m sure, well I’m hoping he’s going to share with us what.

Jonathan: Well dear listeners, as you may gave gathered from at least two, if not three of our previous podcasts is that my lovely co-host, Carrie Brown, likes to make comments about my clothing and I’ve asked Carrie to actually start this podcast with a blindfold on because since she had been giving me such a hard time about what I wear, I figured the only defense I have was simply to wear nothing, while we record a podcast with Carrie. Why don’t you go ahead and take your blindfolds off? I’m just kidding, anyways…

Carrie: Just try that and see what would happen.

Jonathan: Family show. So, as promised last week, we’re going to get into the solution, we spent I think something like 19 episodes really debunking myths and talking about why what we’ve been told hasn’t worked and then why we got told it in the first place and the profit motives behind it but now, we really want to get into how to eat more smarter and the day to day details of smart eating. Certainly, we’ll have even more about this in the future in terms of recipes and things like that but we’ll get the basics down here then we’ll move on to exercise and then we’ll talk about even more fun, practical stuff.

Carrie, the first principle of SANE eating that I want to talk about today is the principle of do not diet. Another similar way of phrasing this is, do not be hungry and the key here Carrie, is that it’s how we define dieting and what we’re doing is not that. If you think about it Carrie, dieting is restricting yourself abnormally for a short period of time and if you remember from all of our previous podcasts, what we’re doing is actually neither one of those things. It’s neither abnormal nor being done for a short period of time.

We’re frankly, just doing what is actually normal like we’re eating normal foods. We’re eating what people ate for 99.8 percent of our evolutionary existence and fortunately that is so simple and there’s such a wide array of delicious foods and we’re doing that for a long period of time. I find it a little difficult to call it a diet when we’re frankly just eating what we ate for hundreds and thousands of years before this problem existed.

Carrie: Well, before I say anything about dieting, I do want to reassure our lovely, loyal listeners you are in fact wearing a very fetching pair of brown, plaid shorts and a rather interesting gray t-shirt with studs in it and I’m not sure about the studs but he’s definitely clothed people.

Jonathan: And he’s not dieting.

Carrie: He’s not dieting. Back to the dieting, I do have to say that I feel like I’m on the anti-diet, since I’ve been eating SANEly because, and I think you mentioned this last week, that some people just have a problem eating enough food and I’m one of those people. I can actually get to the point where I just forget to eat because I’m just not hungry anymore.

Jonathan: If you are hungry, you are not going SANE. Hunger is an inSANE state and part of the reason again, for that… Let’s circle back to some earlier podcast as Dr. Weigle of the University of Washington tells us, “Energy restricted diets are simply a physiological unsound means to achieve weight reduction.”

That’s a direct quote, another direct quote from Dr. Westman over at Duke University, he’s a fantastic researcher, tells us “The persistence of an epidemic of obesity and Type II Diabetes suggests that new nutritional strategies are needed if this epidemic is to be overcome,” put differently, doing the same thing over and over again a.k.a. starving ourselves either whether that’s by not eating or by exercising obsessively hasn’t worked, it will continue to not work. We need a new nutritional strategy.

The good news is that our new nutritional strategy is actually incredibly old and it has a well worn track record. In fact, it has the longest track record of any form of eating in history. It’s eat things you find in nature because that’s all that existed while we were developing the biology that we have today. Obviously, that has to be what we run best on because why would evolution manifest an animal that doesn’t run optimally on the foods that are available to it. It’s a non-sequitur that you think that anything other than that would be true.

Carrie: He’s getting excited folks. He’s waving his arms around. That’s a good sign.

Jonathan: I said non-sequitur without mispronouncing it. I actually did it twice now so I’m quite proud of myself, so the point here, do not diet. Do not be hungry. If you need to think of anything, your goal is to get back to a normal way of eating. I’m defining normal as what works for humans and what humans did do while we weren’t heavy and sick. Get back to normal eating so that your biological processes can get back to functioning normally and when your biological processes are functioning normally, humans can behave like every other animal in the world, which is without trying, you avoid obesity and you avoid diabetes. To be very clear, you can have rats become diabetics. Diabetes is not a unique human condition.

Any being with a pancreas can become diabetic and you can make diabetic rats by feeding them, guess what, sugar and starch, however, if you feed rats what they’re designed to eat, they don’t become obese, they don’t become diabetic. If you feed humans what they’re designed to eat, they don’t become obese and they don’t become diabetic. We get back to normal by getting back to normal, simple.

Carrie: It’s simple. It might not be easy, if you’ve been on the dark side, it might not be easy but it is simple.

Jonathan: For those of us who are a little bit more geeky and math oriented, just to put into perspective, if you do this, again, I don’t really recommend, I definitely don’t recommend calorie counting. If you’re going to count anything, there’s two things to count. One is to count the number of non-starchy vegetables you’re taking in and the goal is double digits, so if you are not eating at least ten servings of non-starchy vegetables per day, you haven’t quite made your way to SANEity and that’s just so important because those are the sanest foods in the world.

The second thing to keep an eye on is the amount of protein you’re taking in. This is going to be a range, depending on your gender and your size and all kinds of fun stuff but that range is between 100 grams of protein and 200 grams of protein. Generally speaking, if you are a small, inactive woman who is not weight training, 100 grams of protein. If you are a large man who is weight training vigorously, you’re more around 200 grams of protein. If you’re in the ballpark of 100 to 200 grams of protein and ten plus servings of non-starchy vegetables per day, at that point, you just add in whole foods, natural fats, and low sugar fruits as needed and you’re SANE.

Fill your plate with 50 percent non-starchy vegetables, just triple the side of non-starchy vegetables, put a huge serving of nutrient dense protein, seafood, nutrient dense meats, organic grass fed beef or lean conventional beef, poultry, things like eggs and egg whites, and then top it with a delicious sauce seasoning and enjoy whole food natural fats. What you’ll find is that you will end up eating approximately… What most people find is that you will get somewhere in the ballpark of 25 to 30 percent of your calories from protein. You’ll get approximately 35 to 45 percent of your calories from fat and then you’ll get approximately 20 to 25 percent of your calories from carbohydrate and that also maps back to the evolutionary template that humans evolved to eat, where we generally got somewhere around a third of our calories from protein, a third of our calories from carbohydrates, and about a third from fat.

A little bit more from fat but it’s generally that balanced ratio, which ironically is actually balanced. When we talk about this in earlier podcasts but for example, the typical US diet, the pyramid diet, which is portrayed as a balanced diet, is neither balanced nor natural. It recommends we get 65 percent of our calories from carbohydrates, 15 percent from protein, 20 percent from fat. That’s not balanced. Low fat diets go even further.

They say15 percent fat, 75 percent carbohydrate, 10 percent protein. The typical US diet is about 16 percent protein, about 50 percent carbohydrate, and about 34 percent fat and then finally, when you’re looking at a low carb diet. This is more of a phase three Atkins not the induction phase, you’re looking at about 65 percent fat, 10 percent carb and about 25 percent protein. The way we’re talking about eating is frankly a very, very balanced way of eating.

The other thing to keep in mind, which Carrie will reiterate, because I know that she likes this, is I’m a big fan of not being necessarily constrained by step by step plans. The reason I say this is because we’re in this for our life and we have to be able to function in the real world and I like to compare using tools like eat this not that, which is fine. It’s whatever, but it’s a bit like trying to learn addition by memorizing every possible combination of numbers. That’s ridiculous. It doesn’t work. The way we learn…

Carrie: You mean you don’t do math like that?

Jonathan: The reason, the way we learn math is we understand the general rule. We assume people are intelligent, which we are, and then we set up general rules and principles and then we say, “I could never anticipate every possible situation you would ever be in so here’s the knowledge, you go apply it,” and knowledge of nutrition is no different. It’s just understand the general rules of eating more smarter and let your wonderful brain take it from there.

Carrie: Awesome. I love that.

Jonathan: Carrie, you have a wonderful brain.

Carrie: I do.

Jonathan: Carrie actually has, she has a very unique spin on SANE eating due to her British heritage. She does all kinds of things with like cabbage which, I’ve never cooked with cabbage in my whole life and I’m like “I had cabbage and leek casserole” and I don’t know what a leek is but that sounds… I look it up and it is SANE. It’s a non-starchy vegetable so…

Carrie: Leeks are awesome.

Jonathan: There you go.

Carrie: Leeks are the best vegetables on earth and lovely people, if you don’t know what a leek is or if you do and you love leeks there’s a whole bunch of leeky recipes up on my blog that you would just love to cook.

Jonathan: You know what Carrie, I think you just came up with a new bestselling book which is The Leeky Recipe Cookbook because it just sounds as good as I’m sure your recipes taste.

Carrie: I might force feed you something soon.

Jonathan: Oh goodness. All these things that we’re talking about here folks of course has graphics up in the show notes but another conceptual tool that people have found helpful is, we’ll run through this right now, which is types of foods or the quantity of certain foods you’re going to eat relative to other common diets because I feel like most of the Smarter Science of Slim listeners, you’ve been on at least one popular diet in your life, so if we could sort of say here’s what a SANE diet is like relative to that, it may help drive it home.

Carrie: Why have we all been on diets?

Jonathan: Why Carrie?

Carrie: Because they don’t work.

Jonathan: There, that’s exactly right. Diets, again by definition, are something temporary and frankly, our goal isn’t anything temporary. We’re not in this to temporarily lose weight. That’s silly so why would we do something temporarily. The goal is to find something so natural, that is so sustainable, that we could simply do it for the rest of our lives. I think that’s what people always say, people always say lifestyle change requires lifestyle change but I don’t know if anyone is really taking the time to define that. When we say lifestyle change, we literally just mean there is something that is practical enough that you just change the way you’re eating. It’s not a diet, you just don’t eat the way you ate anymore and you eat this new way and it’s not that big of a deal and you just kind of do it and it’s not a huge stress.

Carrie: I could eat leeks for the rest of my life, no problem.

Jonathan: You and your leeks, you’re cut off on leeks. We’re having an intervention. Alright, back to this SANE lifestyle relative to other common diets. First let’s talk about vegetables as its own group. This is another key thing I would say that has to do with SANE eating is this whole thing you hear about like eat more fruits and vegetables and fruits and vegetables, fruits and vegetables, like they’re said together and they shouldn’t be. Fruits and vegetables are not in any way shape or form the same thing. Earlier, when I said a requirement of SANE eating is double digit servings of vegetables, that does not mean eleven servings of bananas at all.

Carrie: You’re such a spoilsport!

Jonathan: Vegetables are very distinct from fruits, so let’s talk about vegetables specifically, non-starchy vegetables. We’ve already talked about, a SANE lifestyle is the single, most important component of going SANE and we’ll talk about ways to do that, practically moving forward. Vegetables relative to a typical US diet, most people in the United States eat one maybe two servings of non-starchy vegetables a day so we’re going much, much higher than that. If you even look at the food guide pyramid or my plate, or even traditional low fat diets we’re going higher than that. Is all about non-starchy vegetables and then we’ll talk about fruits.

It depends of the types of fruits we’re talking about but I generally recommend sticking to between zero and three to four servings of low sugar fruits like berries and citrus fruits per day and you just got to have to assess your tolerance. If you’re not seeing the results you would like to see generally speaking, it’s because you may be over consuming fruits and under consuming non-starchy vegetables. Just be cognizant of that. Low sugar fruits are great for you but not everyone especially individuals who’ve really struggled with their weights, even the natural sugars found in fruits can sidetrack them, so just something to be aware of but again, the vegetables are non-negotiable.

Carrie: Just eat more leeks.

Jonathan: Just eat more leeks and we talked about vegetables. We’ve mentioned it before but basically, deep, green leafy vegetables are the way to go. That should be at least, I would say, half of your vegetable intake is coming from spinach, romaine lettuce, broccoli, kale, any kind of it, like mustard green, turnip green, things like that. Stay away from things like iceberg lettuce. That’s nutritionally vapid. Generally speaking, the darker the color, the better it is for you with the exception of cauliflower which is white, but it’s also quite good for you.

Carrie: We love cauliflower.

Jonathan: We do love cauliflower.

Carrie: There’s some really cool, weird things that I’ve done with cauliflower on the recipes that will have you eating way more cauliflower than you ever knew you ever wanted to eat.

Jonathan: In place of mash potatoes, you’ve got mashed cauliflowers. In place of rice, you can do cauliflower rice. It’s amazing what you can do with cauliflower, very cool stuff. Next big thing we’ll talk about is nutrient dense protein so seafood, meat, and eggs. The diet, which is most similar to what we’re going to do here is like a low carb diet or a Paleolithic hunter gatherer type diet.

In some ways, and this is kind of funny, the SANE way of eating is a bit like a mixture of, it sounds funny I know, but an extremely healthy vegetarian diet and a low carb/Paleolithic diet because you take the focus on super healthy nutrient dense animal foods from the low carbohydrate Paleolithic type diet and you blend that with an abundance of nutrient rich non-starchy vegetables that a very, very healthy vegetarian would eat. You just take the best plant foods and you take the best animal foods and you eat them.

Carrie: That sounds like a brilliant idea.

Jonathan: I can’t believe you’re the first person who thought, I’m just kidding. Seriously, all these controversies, let’s just establish a criteria for what makes a calorie better than another. We did that with SANE foods and now we just find that there a SANE animal foods, there’s SANE plant foods, so that’s all good and then we talk about whole foods natural fat.

So again, this is going to be very analogous to a typical low carb or Paleolithic type diet where things like flax seed, chia seeds, coconut, Brazil nuts, almonds, pecans, cashews, all that kind of fun stuff, cocoa, eat it in mass. It’s great for you and that was the three key components of a sane lifestyle, so many vegetables, lots and lots and lots of nutrient dense protein, and then fill yourself up at that point with whole food natural fats. At this point, we kind of get into the gray area, so things like dairy and beans again, there are very few SANE dairy products. Things like low fat and fat free cottage cheese and Greek yogurt are good sources of protein. They’re not as nutritious as other sources of protein so, they’re definitely things we can enjoy.

We can enjoy in mass but I’m going to sort of classify them on their own and then there are things like beans which are not good sources of protein. We’ll talk about why that is later but the general gist of it is beans are about 70 percent carbohydrate by weight. Calling something that’s 70 percent carbohydrate a good source of protein really doesn’t make any sense when there are things out there that are 90 percent protein. If we’re trying to eat protein let’s eat something that is actually predominantly protein. When it comes to certain select dairy products, like Greek yogurt, cottage cheese… Again, enjoy those in abundance.

When it comes to most other dairy products, really every other dairy products that’s going to be higher in sugar, lower in protein, or higher in fats that we don’t really need or not uniquely nutritional, things like milk, traditional yogurt, ice cream, such and such, really try to avoid those if possible. Things like beans and legumes, I’d say zero to two servings per day, so if you like them for variety, it’s not going to be the end of the world. You could still be SANE eating two servings of beans per day but they’re not required. Again, things like oils, we’ve talked about this in earlier podcasts and I know that Carrie would chime in here.

The point with oils is that oils are by definition, a whole food with all the water, fiber, and protein processed out which means by definition, they are not as SANE as the whole food equivalent. If you need to use oil to cook with, use something like coconut oil but I do not recommend that people just like, “Let’s just go crazy with oil!” It would be much better to eat the whole food source of fat, rather than the extracted oil.

Carrie: If you are using a tablespoon to cook six chicken breasts and the amount per chicken breast is so tiny, it’s not going to derail you. It doesn’t make something inSANE and similarly with the dairy. If you’re using half a cup of milk for a meal that’s going to feed even four people, that tiny amount of milk to make a sauce that doesn’t make it inSANE and it’s not going to derail you.

Jonathan: Exactly and then again folks, this graphic again, will be up on the show notes but I want to make it very clear that this is not an all or nothing proposition. The general gist of this is that the more non starchy vegetables, nutrient dense protein, and whole food natural fats you eat in place of starches and sweets and things like high sugar dairy products, the healthier and slimmer you’ll be.

That doesn’t mean you always have to do it, that doesn’t mean you have to be perfect. It just means you have to analyze your goals and say like if my goal is become as fit as I possibly can, well you’re going to be more SANE than if your goal is to just be less overweight. It’s just pick your adventure, choose your own adventure kind of thing.

Carrie: I like to look at things like, I don’t want to say look at your plate as a whole because that kind of reminds you of the whole my plate thing. I don’t look at every ingredient in isolation and go “Is it SANE or is it not?” before I use it. I look at the whole plate as a whole so my half a cup of milk when you add that to the lean chicken breast and all the vegetables I’ve got with that and the one half a teaspoon of cornstarch to thicken it, if you look at the whole plate, that’s SANEr than most everything you’ve eaten to date so it’s all good.

Jonathan: Even to be, I guess, even more conservative than what Carrie just said, if your goal is to have like a flat bikini viable tummy or for like a man, a six pack stomach, well in that case, no milk. However, obviously there are plenty of people around the world that drink milk and are slim. It’s not like drinking milk is going to kill you, we’re just trying to outline, here’s what’s optimal, here’s what suboptimal, pick where you want to be on that spectrum.

Of course, the sub optimal things are starch and added sweeteners whereas a low fat diet or the food pyramid type diet is going to recommend that you eat basically more starch than in anything else from a caloric perspective. Ideally, in a sane lifestyle, you eat more starch than anything else from a caloric perspective. Ideally, in a sane lifestyle, you’re eating no starch, none, zero, zip, zilch. There’s no such thing as safe starch, they’re no such thing as eating starch after a workout. It’s just not part of a SANE lifestyle.

The same thing with added sweeteners, they’re not there. They’re not needed. They’re not uniquely nutritional. We didn’t eat any of these things for 99.8 percent of our evolutionary existence. There is nothing they do that other foods do not do better and that is a fact, it’s not even debatable so just as much as possible get too full for that stuff and in terms of when you look at nutritional labels, this is again another way to just cement these rules and principles in your mind, generally speaking. So let’s talk about carbohydrates, proteins, and fats and fiber, things like that, relative to the typical US diet. When you go SANE, you will be consuming significantly less carbohydrate than a typical US diet because again, you will get the vast majority of your carbohydrates from non starchy vegetables and you will not be eating starches and sweets. A typical US diet contains between 300 and 500 grams of carbohydrate. Generally, you want to stick to 100 grams or less on a SANE lifestyle. That doesn’t mean you need to count these. If you go SANE, you will not be able to eat more than that in carbohydrates.

It’s physically impossible to fit that many non starchy vegetables into your stomach but that said, you will be eating fewer carbohydrates but you will be eating literally an order of magnitude more non starchy vegetables and you’ll probably be even be eating more fruits when you compare that to the traditional US diet. We’ll talk, we may not have time this week, we may, about whether or not a SANE diet is a low carbohydrate diet. I have strong opinions about that but we can talk to that when we get there.

We will be taking in more protein but actually, not that much more than some people traditionally take in, so you will be taking in more protein and from a fat perspective, you’ll actually be taking in about the same amount of fat as a typical US diet but where you get the fat from will be completely different. Where you will be getting fat from are natural sources, so natural, unsaturated, and healthy natural saturated fats, whereas a traditional US diet is getting the balance of its fat from unnatural vegetables oils such as vegetable oil or soy oil or corn oil.

Again, I still scratch my head a little bit thinking about how they get oil from corn but it just seems like a chemical nightmare and then of course trans fats which hopefully you’ve heard of and you know are terrible, terrible, terrible for you. In terms of antioxidants, fiber, and vitamins and minerals, way more, I mean, way, way, more in a typical SANE diet. In some analysis we’ve done we’ve actually seen that one day of SANE eating can provide you with more antioxidants, fiber, vitamins and minerals, than an entire week of a traditional US diet.

Again, the total amount of food you would be eating will be more, the volume of the food will be more. Your shopping cart should be fuller, you should have a fuller plate because these satisfying unaggressive nutritious and inefficient foods are large. They’re rich in water, fiber, and protein. They take up a lot of room on your plate and in your refrigerator and your shopping cart and in your stomach but the good news is you will store less fat and you will feel better because of it.

Carrie: I just want to reiterate though that, especially for people starting out if they kind of joined us in the middle, we’re not about perfection. We’re about moving the line closer to perfection. We’re not about being perfect. We’re about getting closer there and if you have one meal where you have a piece of birthday cake because it’s someone you love’s birthday, it’s fine. You haven’t wrecked anything. The next day you just keep in going towards the goal.

Jonathan: In fact, it is absolutely fine. If you listen to the earlier podcast, we used the clog sink analogy quite heavily and going back to the clog sink and how about this is not about trying to become a fitness model. If you want to become a fitness model, we could talk about how to do that, but I’m assuming most of our listeners are not interested in that particular goal. If you have an unclogged sink and you happen to have a little bit of hair go in the sink, a little bit of the wrong quality stuff, that doesn’t clog the sink.

A sink only gets clogged when we chronically put the wrong quality of stuff in it. So again, just like Carrie said, a lot of non starchy vegetables, a lot of nutrient dense proteins, a lot of whole foods natural fats, be too full for desert, be too full for starches and sweets, just stay on the perimeter of your grocery store, stick to the foods that needs to be refrigerated or frozen.

Stick to foods that you can find in naturally existing. Frankly, stick to foods that often times don’t have nutrition label on them. A lot of these SANE foods we’re talking about, they’re sold in bulk or they’re not heavily packaged so you don’t even see the nutrition facts on them and if you just stick to that, you’ll be surprised how little fat sticks to your body. It’s actually quite simple.

Carrie: Not easy, but simple.

Jonathan: Not easy but simple, so two other quick things I want to cover this week and then next week Carrie, we’re going to talk about protein because the thing that gets the most attention about SANE lifestyle is the amount of protein you’re consuming and I want to make sure that we’re equipped with the science. Really quickly I want to talk about carbohydrates and how people will say that you are on a low carbohydrate diet when you are taking in a SANE level of carbohydrate and just like three quick points on this because this makes me a little crazy.

The single, most important aspect of going SANE is eating a ridiculous amount of non-starchy vegetables. Non-starchy vegetables are carbohydrates therefore, it seems a little bit odd to call a way of eating whose central tenet is eating a certain form of carbohydrate that is a low carbohydrate diet and I realize that we’re eating less carbohydrate than the traditional US diet but that doesn’t make it low carbohydrate. The traditional US diet is an absurdly high carbohydrate diet. Our goal is to eat a not absurdly high carbohydrate diet and that’s not the same as eating a low carb diet.

Carrie: I think, in my opinion, the bigger problem is that people don’t think of vegetables as carbohydrates. They think of vegetables as vegetables and the starches as carbohydrates.

Jonathan: Yeah and sugar.

Carrie: Therefore, eating vegetables is low carb, which it isn’t but I think that’s where the confusion arises and I think you are very clear about the fact that we’re talking about non starchy vegetables versus starchy carbohydrates but I think, you know, most of the people in the world have not made that distinction yet.

Jonathan: Absolutely and people would say, two things. One, I just want to make this clear because there are people out there who are low carb dieting and they will be the first to tell you this, it’s not a low carbohydrate diet. Like low carb diets are seeking generally under 50 or 60 calories of carbohydrate a day so that they could enter a state called ketosis which is generally a state that you will not going to be in when you are eating a SANE lifestyle.

To be clear, my research very much supports ketogenic diets. From a therapeutic perspective, a lot people had a lot of success on them. A lot of people do do what I call low carbohydrate SANE. In fact, this is what I do. So actually, I probably consume and I’m a 200 pound man and I’m pretty lean so that’s a lot of lean tissue.

Carrie: He is 200 pounds. If you’ve seen the photos, he was sitting on my lap the other week and he’s 200 pounds people!

Jonathan: You can go low carbohydrate while being SANE and what that means is basically you’re just eating nothing but non-starchy vegetables and protein and whole food natural fats. However, that is not necessary to be SANE and I just really want to clarify that because again, if you do things like eat a couple of servings of beans a day, if you eat some fruit, if you eat some of low sugar dairy, if you eat some nuts, all on top of your non-starchy vegetables you are very easily clear or be around 100 gram of carbohydrate mark but do keep tabs on that.

If you’re not seeing the results you want to see, keep a little bit of tabs on that and try to stick in the 100 gram of carbohydrate per day range. We’re not going for a low carbohydrate, we’re going for a balance and we’re going for the most bang for our buck in terms of carbohydrates. The other thing is, is a SANE way of eating a high fat diet and it is not and the reason it is not is because again, we’re going to get between 30 and 45 percent of our calories from fat even potentially up to 50 or 60 if you do a low carbohydrate type SANE diet.

That’s not required but again, people who actually eat low carbohydrate, high fat diets, these individuals are consuming 70 to 80 percent of their calories from fat. That’s a high fat diet and again, that can be great but it shown for epileptic individuals, for individuals with all Alzheimer’s disease, for individuals with severe metabolic dysfunction, those types of diets have been shown to be therapeutically very beneficial. It’s not something we necessarily need to do as a part of a SANE lifestyle but the key thing when it comes to fat is to not fear it.

I want to give one quick declaimer here, two quick disclaimers actually, two quick disclaimers about fat. Very common question I hear about a SANE lifestyle is I often will recommend lean cuts of meat and I would often recommend things like low fat or non fat Greek yogurt and low fat and non fat dairy. Now to be very clear, when you go SANE, your goal is to consume as much nutrition as possible.

If you’re going, if you want to get your fat from a fatty cut of meat that’s just fine and if you want to get your fat the entire egg versus just an egg white that’s fine and if you want to get your fat from full fat dairy products, that’s fine however, if you do want to enjoy nuts and seeds and coconut and cocoa and you want to essentially eat high fat seafood you might need to pick where you get your fat from.

It’s not about saying “Oh my God, Jonathan says don’t be afraid of fats and then he says he eat low fat Greek yogurt, he’s contradicting himself.” I will eat the low fat Greek yogurt because actually, I’m not eating just low fat Greek yogurt, I’m taking the low fat Greek yogurt and I’m mixing in cocoa powder and I mixing in almond butter, and I’m mixing in some cinnamon and I chose to get my fat from cocoa powder and from almond butter because there’s some pretty awesome nutritional benefits there.

I’m not afraid of fat, I just choose where I get my fats just like we choose where we get our protein. We’re not getting our protein from pink slime, we get our protein from high quality sources. We’re not getting our carbohydrates from sugar, we’re getting our carbohydrates from high quality sources. We just do the same thing with fats. We get our fats from the most nutritionally robust whole food source as possible and we enjoy them because they’re super delicious.

Carrie: It’s also when where talking about specifically about things like lean cuts of meat, low fat, non fat cottage cheese and Greek yogurt, the point is not the low fat. The point is we’re trying to increase our protein. If you take the fat out there’s a lot more protein.

Jonathan: Exactly the ratio is there.

Carrie: It’s not that we’re eating those things because they’re low fat, we’re eating those things because they’re high protein.

Jonathan: Exactly, yes. Another example, if you are going to eat a bacon with breakfast, it may be a good idea to eat bacon with a blend of egg whites and whole eggs rather than bacon and full eggs if you’re going after a SANE ratio of protein to fat. If you were on a high fat, low carbohydrate diet, you wouldn’t do that because you’re trying to get 80 percent of your calories from fat, we’re not.

Carrie: Did you hear people? He said you can eat bacon and bacon is good. We like bacon but just look at the whole plate.

Jonathan: Just look at the whole plate. Exactly!

Carrie: Look at the whole plate then look at your whole day.

Jonathan: Remember again, the two, and this is the distinction, some people who are not, I guess reading as many blogs as I do and get out there because people like to nitpick stuff and I just like to be really clear. When you eat a low carbohydrate, high fat diet, you are intentionally trying to eat high fat low carbohydrate, and when you eat a SANE lifestyle your goal is to maximize non starchy vegetable consumption and to consume between 100 and 200 grams of protein.

Those are your priorities. After that, eat as much fat as you want until you are full from whole food natural sources but those are our priorities and like Carrie said, you got to focus on the protein and then you focus on the vegetables, and then fat is there to be enjoyed but it’s not the focal point.

Carrie: As I say, we’re not about perfection but you also have when you’re not enjoying the food we’re eating then, we’re not going to stick to it.

Jonathan: Exactly and we’re not about perfection but we also want to make sure we’re, if we do this with the expectation that’s something’s going to change about our bodies, we have to make sure we’re actually doing it. This is a somewhat sad and funny story. I was talking with this individual there and he was like “Yeah, I’ve been going SANE but I haven’t really seen any results” and I asked her to write down what she was eating and this woman happened to be a vegetarian.

There’s nothing wrong with that, some of the most successful individuals on the SANE lifestyle are vegetarians but her breakdown of what she was eating in the day consisted of four servings of non starchy vegetables, two servings of protein, and then there was like six servings of dairy, six servings of fruits and a bunch of starch. I was like, you’re not going SANE so again, those two things that are required then enjoy fat and that’s really it Carrie.

Next week, let’s talk about protein, let’s talk about why getting between 100 and 200 grams of protein per day is incredibly healthy and incredibly metabolically beneficial and then we’ll get into five specific steps for how we can eat more but smarter.

Carrie: I love protein.

Jonathan: Carrie loves protein and I think hopefully we’ll all love protein because it is far in a way the most satiating of all of the macro-nutrients and does all kinds of wonderful things in terms of metabolic enhancements, preserving lean muscle tissue and fundamentally we’re made up of protein so “Eat what you are.” I forgot you said that quote but it’s a great quote. We are a collection of fat and protein so eating fat and protein is pretty good call because that’s what we are.

Carrie: Eating proteins made my muffin top go away.

Jonathan: There you go eat more and burn more. I love it. Carrie, this is a good podcast. We’re living the Smarter Science of Slim here. Eat more, exercise less, smarter. See you next week.

This week:
– Why SANE eating isn’t a diet
– How hunger is an inSANE state
– How we get back to a normal weight by getting back to a normal way of eating
– How every other animal avoids obesity without trying and how we can to
– Don’t count calories and what to count instead
– What to make your plate look like to go SANE
– How SANE eating compares to common diets
– How we have to differentiate fruits and vegetables
– The most SANE vegetables
– How SANE eating is like a very health vegetarian diet combined with a very healthy low-carb/paelo diet…you simply enjoy the best plant and the best animal foods
– What to do with dairy and legumes while going SANE
– How you don’t always have to be SANE
– How much carbohydrate, protein, and fat to consume relative to a typical US diet
– How a single day of SANE eating can provide more nutrition that a whole week of a typical US diet
– How to go SANE at home
– How to go SANE at the grocery store
– How to go SANE when you eat out
– How a SANE lifestyle isn’t a low-carbohydrate diet
– How a SANE lifestyle isn’t a high-fat diet
– How we should be selective about where we get fat just like we’re selective about where we get our protein and carbohydrate
– How going SANE isn’t about perfection

Protein, Carbohydrate, and Fat in Common “Diets”

What a SANE Plate Looks Like

Types of Food to Eat Relative to Common Diets

A Natural Balanced Diet vs. the Typical U.S. Diet

A Typical Trip to Costco